Star Wars: The Jaws of Jakku by Cavan Scott

Author:Cavan Scott [Scott, Cavan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf_space
Publisher: Disney–Lucasfilm Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Trapped

"Stop!" I said, freezing where I stood.

Tails had been riding on my shoulder but scurried back to the relative safety of my pocket as he recognized the warning in my voice.

Finn did as I asked, halting beside me. "What is it?"

"There's something else here," I told him, my blood running cold as I listened intently. "Behind the bulkheads. No, that wasn't right." I cocked my head, my montrals feeling the vibration in the cold air. "Above. In the ceiling."

We all looked up. Above us was a grating that ran down the center of the corridor's roof, some kind of crawl space for technicians or a ventilation channel.

I wanted to run. The passageway turned ahead, and while I had no idea what lay around the corner, it couldn't be worse than what I imagined crawling in the shaft above us.

My first thought was gnaw-jaws, but I couldn't hear the telltale chit-chit-chit. That didn't mean it wasn't another horror watching us from above. Plenty of things on Jakku could hurt you—pole-snakes, landcrawlers, bloodpeds…

No one said a word, not even BB-8, whose head was bobbing left and right. We were all waiting for something to happen, but nothing did.

What was going on? I was sure I'd heard something. Knew I'd heard something. Had I been mistaken? Could it just have been the ship finally settling?

"I can't sense anything up there," Rey said softly, her hand resting on her lightsaber hilt. "Nothing alive, at least."

Then I must have gotten it wrong.

"I'm sorry—" I began, before there was a crack, a thud, and Finn cried out.

Above him, the grate had swung open and something small and black had dropped onto Finn's shoulders. Something small and black that was jabbing at his neck with…an electro probe!

"Not again!" he yelled as Rey swept her hand to the side.

Whatever had dropped from the ventilation shaft flew from Finn's shoulders. It bounced off the wall and landed on its back on the deck, tiny legs flailing. Tiny mechanical legs. Tiny droid legs.

"RJ?!" I gasped as disgruntled Finn pulled his blaster and aimed at the tiny unit.

"He's scrap!" Finn said, his finger on the trigger.

"No, don't!" came a voice from around the corner I'd wanted to sprint around. "Please don't hurt him. Something's wrong with him!"

I knew that voice.

I was already running as RJ-21 flipped back onto his feet. I tore around the corner, no longer thinking of monsters and horrors, and found the droid's owner trapped beneath a pile of fallen beams. "Velorie?!"

"Leesa!" she cried out when she saw who I was. "Thank the stars! Everything went wrong at once. RJ-21 tried to access the computer—"

"—and then went wild?" I asked, examining the beams to see if I could move them.

"How did you know?" she asked, more scared than I had ever seen her.

"It happened to our droid too."

I wasn't going to be able to shift this lot, not on my own.

"Your droid?" Velorie asked before shaking off the question and returning to her own plight. "RJ attacked me and then the ship lurched.

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